Computers are becoming more and more an aspect of everyday life. Children as young as two years old are now exposed to computers and software programs in a home environment and they are now commonplace in schools, businesses, factories, and virtually every aspect of life.
User assistance programs are systems developed to provide guidance to the user of a software program. Wizards, coaches, and guides, all of which walk the user through the steps of a particular program, are well known. A drawback of these prior art systems, however, lies in the “snapshot” nature of such systems. Most programs comprise an interrelated series of steps to be performed, with the sequence of steps being variable depending upon the process to be performed. Typically, the user follows a “decision tree” where the user is given information about the present step (the currently-selected step) to be taken and is given instructions to either go to the next step (e.g., by hitting the “next” button in a GUI) or to go back to the previous step (e.g., by pressing a “back” button). While such systems do provide assistance, they provide no information regarding anything other than the immediately preceding or immediately subsequent step, i.e., there is no long-term historical path showing steps already taken, nor is there a “future” path given to show the user the likely steps to follow. Further, in a typical decision tree system, moving from a present frame to a previous frame will delete any information input into the present frame, i.e., the user cannot jump back and forth between positions in the tree structure without losing data input.
Another problem with typical decision tree systems is that the user may be able to move along the tree structure along “branches” which ultimately end up at a location where the particular user is unauthorized to perform any activity, or where the user simply did not wish to go, but could not tell for sure until he or she got there. For example, often a user relying on the user assistance aspects of a program is a novice user who is unfamiliar with the program and its operation. Frequently the user will receive error messages advising that a particular step requires a prior step to be performed, even though the particular user is not authorized to perform the step. This can cause the user to unknowingly take a path that leads to an undesired destination, wasting valuable time and increasing user frustration.
One example of a system involving a complicated set of processes that must be navigated, and which can benefit from a user assistance system, is in the field of software development. To support the explosive growth of computer usage, software development has become a key part of any company engaged in high-technology business. Large companies such as IBM and Microsoft may have many software development groups located at numerous locations throughout the world, with each group employing hundreds or thousands of employees. With large numbers of employees focusing their work on the development of these assets, management becomes a critical task. Typically, software development “teams” within a company, made up of many developers who are sometimes at different locations, are employed to produce a final product.
The use of software development teams allows the work required to develop a final software product to be divided among many individuals. Throughout the development of a product from start to finish (referred to herein as the software “life cycle”), different individuals access the components of the product being developed at all different times. To enable proper management of the product development, systems referred to as software configuration management (SCM) systems have been developed to allow control of the process to be maintained. These systems allow tracking and control of software development, and allow management of software development projects with respect to issues such as multiple developers working on the same code at the same time, targeting multiple platforms, supporting multiple versions, and controlling the status of code (for example, beta tests versus real release). Once such example of an SCM system is the VisualAge TeamConnection Enterprise Server™ developed and sold by IBM.
Utilization of SCM systems greatly increases productivity and simplifies the software development process for the development team members. Among their many benefits, SCM systems can provide user assistance by displaying to the developer the next step in the programming sequence; allowing different actions to be performed at different times, depending on input from a team leader; and allowing different team members to be authorized to perform different actions, while excluding access to others, based on input from a team leader. However, these programs may still be quite complicated and users of the SCM system can still get confused as to how far along in the life cycle they are, what steps in the life cycle are available to them, and what paths in the life cycle are most likely to be coming up, i.e., the problems of the prior art discussed above are not solved through the use of a typical SCM system.
Accordingly, it would be desirable to have a navigator program or user assistance system which combines an active display of the past, current, and future steps in an ongoing process with a series of associated decision panels and forms to be completed in order to carry omit the steps.